A practice of divination using bowls of brass - a metal thought to protect against evil spirits - which were filled with water or ink and used as focal points in scrying or capturing glimpses of the future in scenes and images appearing in the bowl. The diviner would stare at the liquid without blinking until a trancelike state was entered and visions experienced. Said to have been the practice by which Nostradamus came about his knowledge of the future.
CAUL
A thin membrane of amniotic fluid that sometimes covers the head of a baby at birth. Since the time of the ancient Romans those born with a caul are considered to be blessed with good luck and supernatural powers, such as the ability to see into the future and to communicate with ghosts and spirits.
See also Amniomancy.
CAULD LAD OF HILTON
In English folklore the Cauld Lad of Hilton is a spirit who is half brownie and half ghost and who is alleged to have haunted Hilton Castle in Northumbria. Hilton Castle is now in ruins.
According to legend the spirit was supposed to have been that of a stable boy killed by a past Lord of Hilton in a rage because the boy didn’t immediately obey his order to fetch a horse. The boy was killed with a hayfork and his body was tossed into the pond. The spirit, a young naked boy, was supposedly heard working about the kitchen at nights. Usually he would tidy up and do chores, but sometimes he would toss things about and disarrange whatever had been left tidy.
He was an unhappy spirit who could be heard singing sadly. The servants eventually banished the spirit one night by laying out a green cloak and hood for him. At midnight he put them on and frisked about ’til cock-crow singing,
Here’s a cloak and here’s a hood,
The Cauld Lad of Hilton will do nae mair good!
And with the coming of the dawn it is said he vanished forever.
CAUSINOMANCY
A form of divination that involved placing objects on a fire. If the object burned slowly or failed to ignite, it was taken to be a bad omen. If the object ignited and burned quickly, it was considered a good omen.
CAYCE, EDGAR [1877–1945]
A psychic reader and ESP researcher who arguably did the most in the twentieth century to advance psychic knowledge. Born in rural Kentucky, Cayce was close to his grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Cayce, who was said to be psychic. One day tragedy struck; Cayce witnessed the horrific death of his grandfather in an accident with a horse. After this incident, and encouraged by his mother and grandmother, the young Cayce claimed to visit his grandfather’s spirit in the barns.
Cayce experienced other traumas in his youth. At 15 he was hit from behind by a baseball and began to feel dizzy. His father sent him to bed, and he entered into a hypnotic trance, telling his father exactly what needed to be done to make him better. His father followed these instructions, and Cayce recovered within a day. When he was in his early twenties he lost his voice. Helped by a travelling hypnotist, Cayce again entered into a trance. While in the trance he was once again able to diagnose a cure. He coughed up some blood, and his voice returned.
In 1901, Cayce started to give psychic readings to clients, and over the next 40 years he gave and recorded in writing over 12,000 readings on health, past lives, ancient mysteries and predictions of the future. These readings are still being studied today.
In 1933 Cayce and his supporters formed in Virginia Beach (where it still remains today) the Association for Research and Enlightenment for the purpose of studying, researching and providing information about ESP, as well as life after death, dreams and holistic health. Three other programmes or organizations were also established around Cayce’s work: a master’s degree in transpersonal studies at Atlantic University, Virginia Beach, was set up in 1930; the Edgar Cayce Foundation, also at Virginia Beach, was set up in 1948 to provide custodial ownership of the Cayce readings and documents; and a diploma in preventive health care based on Cayce’s readings was set up in 1986 at the Harold Reilly School of Massotherapy
Cayce was a remarkably gifted psychic with an incredible intellect. It is said that he could sleep on any book, paper or document and remember its contents when he awoke. He was able to use his psychic abilities in four ways: precognition, retrocog-nition, clairvoyance and telepathy. That is, he could see into the future and predict events to come; he could look into a person’s past to find the origins of an existing health problem; he could see inside the human body and see through objects; and he was able to enter another person’s mind to discover what they were thinking.
Called the ‘Sleeping Prophet’, Cayce practised absent healing for several years, helping to cure people all over the world, even though he had no formal education and never went to medical school. Receiving a name and address, Cayce would enter a trance state and then read the person’s condition and prescribe cures and treatments, which were, reportedly, 90 per cent accurate. His success was so great that thousands sought his help. Cayce’s ability to diagnose accurately and name body parts astonished some medical experts, although others dismissed his readings on account of his lack of formal training.
In August 1944, with three to four years’ backlog of mail, Cayce collapsed with exhaustion. He was aware that doing more than two readings a day was too much for his body and mind, but over the years he had been so moved by the suffering of others that he was doing far in excess of this number. He retired to the mountains to recuperate, returning home in November 1944. On 1 January he told his friends he would find healing on the 5th, and they prepared for the worst. On 5 January, Cayce died peacefully at the age of 67.
Cayce spent much of his life trying to understand what he did when he entered a trance. He spoke about unknown civilizations where the soul could travel without the restriction of gravity and communicate through thought. He attributed poor health to harmful deeds in a past life, and many of his readings concerned karma and reincarnation. The chief difference between Cayce’s suggested treatments and conventional medicine was that Cayce sought to heal the whole body by treating the causes rather than the symptoms of a patient’s problem. The patient, however, needed to have faith and hope in the reading for it to work. Mind is the builder, Cayce would always say, and he firmly believed that the body responded to commands from the mind.
Cayce maintained that we all have psychic ability and that experiences such as dreams and intuition are proof of that. He also believed that if a person had good intentions and love in their heart they would always have a steady supply of psychic power to tap into.
CELESTIAL LIGHT
Known within the New Age movement as ‘the pure white light of the universe’, the celestial light is believed to be energy transmitted from a more spiritually advanced realm to protect and heal those who invoke it.
CELLULAR MEMORY
The concept that every single cell in our body contains
